“Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.” And equally foreseen were all the forms of falsehood, cruelty, and evil upon the earth. Hence the inspired predictions concerning the hateful enemy of Christ.
Our blessed Lord repeatedly admonished his disciples concerning false teachers, who would be distinguished by their inhumanity; and the apostle Paul, in correcting the mistakes of some, regarding the day of judgment as being near, says, “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.”—(2 Thess. ii. 3, 4.) Again, he represents the character of Romish teachers, and says, “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them who believe and know the truth.”—(1 Tim. iv. 1—3.)
Still more remarkable is the prediction described by the apostle John: “And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration. And the angel said unto me, Wherefore dost thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns. The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings. And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, who have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful. And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues. And the woman whom thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.”—(Rev. xvii. 1—18.)
All these several predictions have been fulfilled with the most striking completeness; and we may have to refer to them in the course of this work; but the descriptions in those from the Revelation require our very special notice, as they lead us more particularly to the Romish hierarchy, and to the terrible court of inquisition. The Rev. Mr. Elliott, in his “Commentary” on this chapter, says:—
“This vision represented pictorially a gaudily dressed drunken harlot, seated on a beast of monstrous form, with seven heads, and on the seventh ten horns. The beast, in respect of its body, depicted the papal empire of the ten western European kingdoms; and in respect of the seventh, or rather, eighth head, the succession of Roman popes, constituting, from after the sixth century, that empire’s spiritual rulers. So the woman represented Rome in its character of the papal see, and mother-church of Western Christendom; including, doubtless, as part and parcel of herself, the ecclesiastical state, or Peter’s patrimony, in Italy, and vast dominions, convents, churches, and other property appertaining to the papal church elsewhere, both in Europe and over the world.
“1. As the beast’s body both upheld and was subject to the woman, the rider, so the empire, as a whole, with the power of its secular kingdoms and many peoples, upheld, and was also at the same time ruled by papal Rome, the mother-church of Christendom.
“2. As the woman was here depicted before St. John under a double character, viz., as a harlot to the ten kings, and a vintner or tavern-hostess vending wines to the common people, just according to the custom of earlier times, in which the harlot and the hostess of a tavern were characters frequently united; so the church of Rome answered to the symbol in either point of view; interchanging mutual favours, such as might suit their respective characters, with the kings of Anti-Christendom; and to the common people dealing out for sale the wine of the poison of her fornication, her indulgences, relics, transubstantiation-cup, as if the cup of salvation, &c. (see the Pope’s own medal, holding out the cup of her apostacy, struck at Rome on occasion of the Jubilee in 1825), therewith drugging and making them besotted and drunk.
“3. With regard to the portraiture of the woman, robed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold, and precious stones and pearls, it is, as applied to the Romish church, a picture, characteristic and from life; the dress specified being distinctively that of the Romish ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the ornaments those with which it has been bedecked beyond any church called Christian; nay, beyond any religion, probably, that has ever existed in the world; not to add that even the very name on the harlot’s forehead, Mystery, (a name allusive, evidently, to St. Paul’s predicted mystery of iniquity,) was one, if we may repose credit on no vulgar authority, once written on the Pope’s tiara; and the apocalyptic title, ‘Mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth,’ the very parody, if I may so say, of the title Rome arrogates to herself, ‘Rome, mother and mistress.’
“4. As to the harlot’s being depicted ‘drunken with the blood of the saints,’ its applicability to the Romish church, throughout the latter half, at least, portion of the beast’s 1260 predicted years of prospering, is written in deep-dyed characters on the page of history.”
Nothing can be more evident than that “Babylon the Great” designs the mystical city of the papal commonwealth, a regnant system of spiritual wickedness—an idolatrous church. This was the judgment of all the chief reformers in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Scotland. Some even of the Roman Catholics had the same conviction; and Petrarch, the celebrated Italian poet, calls the papal court “The Babylonian harlot, mother of all idolatries.”